Radical innovation: crossing knowledge boundaries with ...

4. Wedding Creativity and Knowledge
This chapter discusses the dynamics associated with two concepts central to
conventional understanding of interdisciplinarity and innovation: creativity and
knowledge. We explore two particular social and organizational dynamics, those of
team-work and knowledge transfer.
4.1. Creativity
Creativity is a fundamental aspect of innovation, but it is unhelpful to attribute it to a
specific aspect of a project, phase of a programme, or partner in a collaborative
relationship.
The leadership and management of interdisciplinary endeavours is a creative task.
Interpreting, assimilating or appropriating the outcomes of innovation is creative. All
participants in an interdisciplinary collaboration may acquire creative insights to
return to their respective disciplines or organisations.
As noted by Geoff Crossick 15 , and analysed in more detail in Thrift (2006), new
business models and economic trends attempt to draw in the creativity of consumers
to the network of other allegiances that the consumer already has to the product.
These new models also (through open innovation, open source, ‘continuous beta’ or
user innovation models) persuade consumers to contribute directly to the innovation
cycle of the product itself. Interdisciplinarity and innovation might be considered a
natural response, in the R&D and HE sectors, to mirror these increasingly distributed
models of creativity. The increasing awareness of the importance of addressing the
issue of creativity in social relations, and the attention paid to distributed creativity, is
to some extent coterminous with the development of new technologies that facilitate
greater interactivity. It is therefore necessary to deploy a greater range of academic
techniques to understand and analyse the social processes through which creative
potential becomes manifest (for example, as Geoff pointed out, carrying out
ethnographic research among potential customers in order to capture potential
innovation). Moreover, as companies re-organise themselves to accommodate
distributed creativity into their own innovation models, it becomes clear that the
creativity step of the innovation cycle cannot be contained within a particular
organisational silo of the company, but must be managed in a boundary-crossing and
interdisciplinary way.
It is important to stress that while the importance of creativity to innovative process is
often stressed in business management literature (eg. De Meyer and Garg 2005), the
notion of creativity is rarely explored in depth. In this literature creativity is often
15 Expert witness report
Innovation and Interdisciplinarity 35